Because the rules are what they are in America,
we love to hear about men who will not bow down,
whose gold-capped teeth reflect the paradisial and
that gambled-away glow in which we find ourselves.
But those who disparage the rule makers want power,
and one cannot love the Ur-Male without reservation
since whose fault is it that the world is a boxing ring?
Returning from exile, in newsreel footage, a reporter
asked Johnson why women (meaning, white women)
preferred men like him. The champion hell-raisers.
Men whose faces light hits and we see what’s inside.
He said, It’s because we like to eat cold eels and
think distant thoughts then stared, meaningfully.
Which meant that he didn’t have an explanation.
When a man like that makes love, he thinks of
giving and taking beatings, of ass whippings.
O Jack, we are all knocked down and rising.
Lives are like fake-sky murals covering the
ceilings of flophouses. I read somewhere
you said your career proved that triumph
at thieving wages transforms nothing—
not bad for a boxer who collected clocks.
A man on the run from the powers that be
and time, which says what it says about each of us.
If lives speak, yours said—and I’m paraphrasing—
a man can never truly love anything over which
he has no power, especially a country so beautiful
it promises to lie and break your heart. Then does.